Tag: anne bogart

just to follow up on yesterday’s post. I do know. Or, to put it plainly, I know a little more than yesterday. Anne Bogart’s words are always a comfort to me when panic sets in and I have no sense of direction. Yes, I will always feel a sense of inadequacy or inability to convey my own meaning, but there is also a space in myself where things do get clear once I commit to making them clear.

I spent most of this morning typing up my notes from yesterday, and they made sense. Interaction and community building are my focus in this creative process, as hard as that is while rehearsing and preparing the encounter with the audience. Narrative-building for identification purposes is not on my list of priorities. And characterization is, as everything in this piece, a question of choices, bold ones, and layering. Layering, layering, layering. Layers allow perspectives, and they allow the development of individual participation and collective strategy. As well as questioning. Where questioning brings constructive doubt, and constructive doubt allows self-observation, awareness and imagining something different, maybe more powerful, maybe less, but always innovating.

“Every time I begin to work on a new production I feel as though I am out of my league; that I know nothing and have no notion how to begin and I’m sure that someone else should be doing my job, someone assured, who knows what to do, someone who is really professional. I feel unbalanced, uncomfortable and out of place. I feel like a sham. In short, I am terrified.” Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares. London and New York: Routledge (2001). pp. 84

This is were I stand today. On the verge of creation, terrified. Terrified that I am not expressing myself correctly, and letting myself be misguided by other people’s expressions. That I am not filtering correctly what POST•M should be about. That I do not have the knowledge and the analysis needed for it. That my artistic abilities are will never be compelling enough.

And yet I know that I have moved before. And that, if I have come so far, it is out of need. So the road ahead must be walked somehow.

“When I am lost in rehearsal, when I am stymied and have no idea what to do next or how to solve a problem, I know that this is the moment to make a leap. Because directing is intuitive, it involves trembling and terror into the unknown. Right there, in that moment, in that rehearsal, I have to say, ‘I know!’ and start walking towards the stage. During the crisis of the walk, something must happen; some insight, some idea. […] I create the crisis in rehearsal to get out of my own way. I create despite myself and my limitations, my private terror and my hesitancy. In unbalance and falling lie the potential to create.” ibid. pp.86

Here I am. Lost and terrified. Letting the crisis be there, so that that decision, that potential to create can happen.